by Chris Stuck
Dedication
For Doris, Jerry, and Lisa
Epigraph
A man does not run among
thorns for no reason;
either he is chasing a snake
or a snake is chasing him.
—African proverb
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Every Time They Call You Nigger
How to Be a Dick in the Twenty-First Century
Lake No Negro
And Then We Were the Norrises
Cowboys
Chuck and Tina Go on Vacation
This Isn’t Music
The Life and Loves of Melvin J. Plump, Esq.
Give My Love to the Savages
Acknowledgments
Credits and Permissions
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Every Time They Call You Nigger
It happens first in kindergarten. You’re five. You and your classmates are playing soccer against the first graders. This is at Saint James Catholic School in Falls Church, Virginia, a school your parents will soon decide is too goddamn expensive. In a year, they will send you to public school, where you will hear the word more often. But this is before all that.
You’re on a hot blacktop, in a roiling sea of kids. It seems like there are ten games going at once, multiple balls, multiple goals. You’ve been alive for only five years. You don’t know how the game works. So, you stand near the goal like everyone else. The ball happens to come your way. You try to kick it. You actually connect! And, your luck, the ball gets by the redheaded first grader in goal. Everyone goes crazy except him. He looks back at you with fire in his freckled face. He calls you the word just once. Nigger.
You’ve never heard it before. The venom in his voice tells you it isn’t good. Your friend Jerry jumps on the redhead and drags him to the ground. Jerry is way darker than you and knows the meaning of the word, even at five. The back of the kid’s head hits the pavement, sounding like someone cracking open a coconut. There’s blood everywhere. Kids scatter. The redhead gets led away by a team of nuns, his white dress shirt now wet and bright red. Everyone watches him leave, before going back to their games. When things settle down, you move away from the goal. You aren’t stupid. You let yourself get swallowed by that sea of kids so no one else can call you any other new names.
* * *
The year is 1980, and you’re what’s called mixed. From that day in kindergarten on, though, the world considers you Black. Not quite all the way Black but Black, Black enough to be called nigger. You even look Black or mixed or like you’ve got some Black in you. This is what people tell you without you asking. If your mother’s Black, they say, you’re Black. That’s the rule. So, all your bases are covered. You’re fucking Black. Your father is white, of German and Irish descent. Your last name in German means “piece.” You’re a piece of this and a piece of that. You wouldn’t want to be anything else.
In your house, the word “nigger” exists but mostly in the abstract. Your three older half brothers from your mother’s first marriage, whose father is Black and whom you grow up with, may occasionally say it when your mother isn’t around. She doesn’t approve of the word. She’s lived through segregation. She’s been bussed. The word is ugly to her, but at family reunions she still laughs with all her siblings and cousins as they call each other the word as a punch line, with love and affection. You see the word transform from slimy larva into a nimble butterfly. You watch it take flight.
* * *
The second time, one of your white friends says it. Looking back, it’s not unexpected. You’re in fifth grade and are playing tackle, a form of tag in which you and a gang of your friends tackle the shit out of whoever is holding the football. The game was once called smear the queer, but your PE teacher says you shouldn’t call it that anymore. Words and their context haven’t quite jelled in your heads yet. You call the game smear the queer anyway when your teacher isn’t around.
In the heat of play, you tackle your friend a bit too hard and knock the wind out of him. He’s gasping for air. As you get up, he wheezes, “Get off, you fucking nigger.” You remember Jerry. You’re supposed to do something when a white person calls you this. Naturally, the punches fly. There are bloody lips.
This is in the suburbs, so of course both your parents are called. There’s a big meeting with the administration. Your white friend apologizes. He admits that he doesn’t know why he used it. He says he’s never even thought the word. It just came out. You and your other friends know your white friend’s mother is dying of cancer, and his father isn’t around. He has a way worse home life than you and your friends of color do. You all still keep hanging out with him, but you never really forgive him. Eventually, his mother dies, and your friend, whose name you’ll one day forget, moves away. The only thing you will remember is getting up after your fight, when the two of you are pulled apart. You can see the recognition on your Black and Hispanic friends’ faces, even your Arab and Asian friends. They help you up. They take you away. They nurse your wound.
* * *
By junior high, you realize the word actually belongs to you. You can say it. Other people can’t. But you and your friends don’t call each other the word. This isn’t the ghetto. Your parents are successful. But you could say it if you wanted. You realize you don’t quite understand it, though. It’s better to just not say it in public at all. You’ve said it in the mirror, trying to sound like Richard Pryor or one of your uncles, but you’ve never had the right cadence. You sound like a child. Maybe you haven’t earned it yet.
When a Black kid named Deron moves to your school from Southeast DC, he calls you and your buddies the word in order to make friends. “What’s up with y’all niggas? Can I hang with y’all niggas?” He thinks you’re just like him. You all feel Blacker, especially your dark-skinned friends who have never seen Southeast like you have, who don’t have family there. None of you say the word back to him, and eventually Deron just stops on his own. When you ask him why, he says it’s because you and your friends always look at him funny when he says it. So, he just starts calling everyone “bro.” It’s a good work-around.
“The suburbs,” he says. “It’s different out here, bro.”
* * *
At some point, you realize white people know not to use the word now, which is surprising. You have a yearlong grace period when it’s not part of your lexicon. All through eighth grade, you’re a regular kid. You know it’s the fear of an ass-whipping or just looking like a racist asshole that keeps white people in check. But they still find ways to slip up.
In ninth grade, you date a new girl at school named Janelle. She’s white and country, horny as all get-out, a little sprite who’ll eventually become what your mother calls “fast.” She’s your first kiss. Your first feel. She teaches you how to navigate her body. It’s love at first touch. But then she tells you about life in the country. You can tell she’s said the word before. You are in the woods behind your house, smoking a joint of what your friend’s older brother said was a twenty sack of Super Killer Skunk but what you will later find out is just oregano. She says her father, a drunk back in the country, often uses the word. Her grandfather, too. She says back home, where the Black people live is called Niggertown. She says her grandmother calls brazil nuts “nigger toes” because they’re dark on one side, light on the other. Her uncles, religious folk, often say “mothernigger” instead of “motherfucker.” Better to be racist than to curse under God’s eyes. She thinks this is kind of funny, the absurdity of it. Who would ever think to combine the word �
��mother” with “nigger”? She kisses your neck. You agree. You think you’re stoned. You think about how all these words are swirling around you, from centuries back, their meanings trailing behind them.
But this is as far as it goes with Janelle. She gets into hard rock music, which you don’t understand, but whatever. She still likes to kiss your neck. One day, while you aren’t around, she walks down the school hall singing a Guns N’ Roses song that says something about “police and niggers” and “immigrants and faggots.” This is just as she walks past your queer Black cousin Vanessa, who gladly kicks her ass up and down the hall. That’s the end of Janelle. You break up. She moves back to the country. You later hear that she’s gotten pregnant at sixteen by some other Black guy. Is he mixed like you? Is he from Niggertown? You and your friends think her pregnancy is sad but sort of funny. You guys wonder what’ll happen to that baby. You no longer smoke oregano. You’ve stepped up to Mexican brick weed that you buy from a senior named Black Dave. You’re stoned out of your mind. You start to think, If Janelle is white, does that make her kid white, too?
“Yep,” one of your friends says. “The only cracker kid in Niggertown.”
Y’all die laughing.
* * *
The word starts coming at you in a variety of ways. For example: hip-hop. Thanks to your older brothers, you’ve always been into it. Sometimes, when you were a kid, tapes from the early shows floated down to Virginia from New York City. Your brothers listened to them constantly. The Fantastic Romantic 5. The Cold Crush Brothers. The Funky 4+1. The Treacherous Three. Busy Bee versus Kool Moe Dee. Then the movies started coming out and the break dancing movement blew up. Run-DMC ruled MTV. Kurtis Blow advertised for Sprite. But the word didn’t figure during these years, not until high school, the early nineties, the golden era.
Just as you stumble into young adulthood, the music starts getting grimy. Every emcee says the word with love and hate. I love my niggas. Fuck you, nigga. You’re called the word by cassette tapes and CDs many times over. There’s no way to really track it. Millions and billions of times. Nigga. Nigguh. Nicca. Nucca. You love it, but you still don’t say it. It’s your language, but it’s also taboo, for the uneducated. That’s the feeling. You and your friends listen to the Geto Boys and NWA, but you know you’re not growing up in the same environment that the rappers did. Still, y’all bump that Niggaz4Life album, whose title had to be reversed to avoid being censored. It’s called Efil4Zaggin now. That makes it even better. It’s a code that only you and your friends understand. Your parents have no idea what you’re talking about anymore, but they look at you suspiciously. They know y’all are up to something.
* * *
Your high school years ramble along. Because you can say a certain word, you and your boys think you have something up on whitey and your teachers. You research all the derogatory names for white people, finding out there are more for you than for them. There’s ofay, cracker, peckerwood, blue-eyed devil, but that’s it. You can’t really use those. They don’t have power, and they’re old, from your parents’ generation. You’re Black, and though all your teachers are white, you know if you insult them, the only thing they can come back with is a word they can’t say. Or a suspension. It’s not much, but it’s something. You’re becoming a bit of a hardhead now.
You’re starting to read your father’s books from the sixties and seventies. Soul on Ice; Another Country; The Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger; Die Nigger Die!; Nigger: An Autobiography by Dick Gregory. Your father was a hippie and has all kinds of books. So does your mother. You’re reading her Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Buchi Emecheta, and J. California Cooper. You don’t understand all of it, but you’re absorbing what you can.
Malcolm X directed by Spike Lee has just come out, and you and your boys see it seven times. Coincidentally, you’re doing well in school now. Maybe you’re smart or maybe your brain is finally working the way it’s supposed to. You still get high, but defiance is your new buzz. You’re nursing a mild addiction to porn, Black porn. When you understand the notion of exploitation, you stop cold turkey. You’re horny as fuck, but you become righteous. Your favorite part of Malcolm X is after he’s ousted from the Nation of Islam, when he laments that it was the best organization Black people ever had, but niggas ruined it. You like this because you now know the difference between Black people and niggas, the difference between niggers and niggas. You think you’re a Jedi in understanding the code. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of race, you will fear no evil.
Still, you keep a mental Rolodex of when the word is used against you. When those white kids from a less diverse school happen to see you rolling in the black Jetta that you bought yourself, tinted up yourself, bolted new rims on all by yourself, after saving for three of the most boring summers ever, those dumbass white kids shout the word at you. Because they’re in eleventh grade and still riding the school bus. Because you have one of your cute Black cousins with you, who they probably think is your girlfriend. Because you have a curly high-top fade like one of your favorite rappers, Special Ed, with your name razored into the back and lines in your eyebrows like one of your other favorite rappers, Big Daddy Kane. You even wear a fat dookie rope that’s way out of style and fake as fuck, and, not to mention, starting to turn your neck green. Naturally, you expect to be called this. You almost want to be called it. Sometimes, you’re surprised you don’t get called the word more often. Cops are starting to look at you funny.
* * *
Once, your manager at the chain bookstore you work at tells you the word’s original definition refers to ignorant people, not Black people. He’s wrong, of course. He’s an older white man who thinks he’s smart and talks to everyone in a you-just-don’t-get-it kind of way. He’s forty-six and works at a bookstore, which doesn’t quite compute. He’s kind of sweaty. “So, why can’t white people use the word, too?” he says. “It’s unfair.”
You say, “But isn’t life all about context and nuance? If you look up ‘asshole’ in the dictionary, it says anus. If I call you an asshole, the meaning’s different.”
He snaps his head at you. He’s not sure if you’ve made a point or just found a funny way to call him an asshole in front of everyone. It’s a little of both. This frustrates him. You’re only a senior in high school. Why aren’t you a bit more stupid given that you’re a semipro pothead? That way he could lord it over you. You wouldn’t let him, though. Besides, you’re taller than he is.
“You know,” he says. “There are white niggers, too.”
Thank God your father isn’t like this. You say, “Why have I never heard a white person call another white person ‘nigger,’ then?”
It’s at this point that your manager decides not to talk to you about this stuff anymore.
You begin to wonder who loves the word more, Black people or white people.
Days later, while shelving books, you hear him on the other side of the stacks, talking to one of your white women co-workers. They’re having what you and your friends call a “white moment,” white people comparing notes. He asks your co-worker why it’s always about race with Black people. Jesus. And then he asks if she knew that you were actually Black.
“Of course,” she says. “Isn’t it obvious? The hair, the clothes, the Malcolm X glasses. He’s Blacker than most Black people I know.”
“Huh,” your manager says. “I thought he was just”—he whispers this part—“a wigger.”
Your co-worker is even older than him. She doesn’t know this term “wigger,” but just its similarity to “nigger” makes her cough and say, “I don’t approve of that language.”
Instead of saying anything, you just come around the corner with your book cart. They look like they’ll each shit a brick. You want to be a wise-ass and tell them that “wigger” is a portmanteau, a linguistic blending of two or more words, in this case, “white” and “nigger.” Instead of referring to a person of mixed heritage like you, it refer
s to a white person who is infatuated with Black culture. You could say all that, but then again, you’ve always known your manager is a chump. He’s wrong about everything. It’s the end of your time here. You finish out your shift, quietly hurt. You’re not coming back ever again. Things are starting to get corny around here anyway.
* * *
You swear off white people for a while. Not your pops, though. He’s cool. For whatever reason, you don’t have a ton of girls breaking down your door at the moment, but if you did and if they were white, you’d say, “I’m sorry. We’re too different.” You might mention the phrase “the struggle,” which is understandable. You’re in college now.
The word still figures pretty prominently in your life, but you got a bunch of other shit going on. You have less time to think about it. You’re probably desensitized. White boys don’t say it anymore. That’s something. Maybe it’s finally going away. They’re just happy to be cool with the Black guys now, whom they sort of defer to when it comes to being hip. A few of the white boys are your friends but not tight friends. Acquaintances is more like it. Your real boys are all of color, many different shades. Sometimes, you catch yourself thinking of them as your niggas, even the Chinese and Japanese homies, but that’s rare. Black people own the word now. You never forget that.
* * *
When your dry spell ends and the girls start noticing you, you ask out Black girls named Ebony and Mahogany, one named Melody, Latina girls named Carmen and Mary Carmen, a girl from Eritrea named Mariam. To your surprise, some of them actually date you, but most just say “Talk to the hand,” and walk away.
During spring semester your sophomore year, you happen to fall in love with an orthodox Muslim girl named Neda. She’s olive skinned and cute. She wears a hijab, which frames her face in a perfect oval. Everything else she wears is designer. She drives a brand-new convertible. Her father prints pocket-size Qurans and is a millionaire because of it. She likes that you like Malcolm X, that you’re interested in Islam. On the strength of this, she lets you kiss her a few times in her car in the school parking lot. Once, you ask if you can see her hair. You don’t realize how big of a deal this is. Reluctantly, she says yes. She removes her hijab. Her hair is shoulder length, colored and highlighted like any other girl’s. But now she’s scared. She thinks she’s going to hell just for kissing you, for showing you her hair. The only way the two of you can do anything more is if you convert.